Tips That Help You Use Google Inbox As Your Primary Mailbox

Inbox by Gmail is my favorite email client right now. Not for the obvious reason that it is from Google, but because of the features it offers. Right from it became available for everyone without an invite, I started using it on my PC and found it useful in many ways. Below are some of those

#1. It lets you segregate emails in bundles depending on the type such as tickets, bills, personal etc.
#2. It is light, faster and has simple interface
#3. Clutters mail stream – Emails finished dealing with can be moved to Done and not important to Low priority at the same time, important ones can be snoozed and pinned.
#4. Above all, it is ad free (as of now)

Keeping aside the fact that it is very easy to use, many people would find it confusing as many useful operations that we used to perform on Gmail aren’t directly present in Google Inbox. One of those, The theme of this post is to explain how to do that.

Understading Bundles in Google Inbox

In Gmail, we can add emails to separate folders, add labels and set up a rule to direct mail from a particular sender to a folder. In Inbox, there aren’t folders and emails get isolated into different sections which are bundles. By default, Google creates some bundles for you to manage in the first place and bundles them. Trips, Purchases, Finance, Social, Forums and Promos come in this category. For example, if you want to see all your ticket and travel information, you can go to Trips bundle. Bundled in the Inbox sections would appear in your mainstream combining all of it as a single message which can be expanded. Also, there are some bundles which are unbundled like – Junk, Personal, Receipts, Travel etc. You can go to settings to manage them, add some emails from inbox to them, or even set up a rule to redirect messages from a sender to a particular folder in the future. The good thing, though, You can create a custom bundle as well.

Moving A Message To A Bundle

To move a message to a bundle, hover the mouse to a message and select three dot menu and select the bundle. Or, you can create a new one by selecting “Create New”. Here is how it looks-

When you move a message, Google would ask you whether you want to do this every time. You can select there if you want or you can modify that in Settings, anyway. You can do this in two ways. One, on the left pane, you can access each bundle or you can go to Settings-> Labels to manage.

Click “Add” to specify one or more email addresses to redirect emails to a bundle.

Moving Message Between Bundles

Suppose if you accidentally move a message to a wrong bundle, fortunately, there is a way to correct it. The first thing you need to keep in mind is whenever you move a message to a bundle, it would get marked as done at the same time. So, you can find all messages which go to unbundled or custom bundles, you can find them in Done section as well. Moving a message among bundles is simple just hover to the message and select appropriate bundle in the menu. Below is the screenshot-

If you wish to remove a message from a bundle, then the message would get moved to Done section. So, only those emails which are new and which doesn’t fall under any bundle category would appear on the mainstream. If you want an email in the past or an email belonging to another bundle to show up in Inbox section, you can simply snooze it.

Disable Bundling Messages in the Inbox

As mentioned earlier, messages bundled in the inbox would appear as a group in the mainstream. If you want to, you can turn it off. Just head over to settings->labels and set the option to “off”. Mind you, unbundled labels and custom bundles cannot be bundled in Inbox.

Customize Snooze Times

For many of us, it is not possible to check emails all the time. Google Inbox lets you set a time in a day by default so that when you snooze an email to a particular day, it would arrive your inbox at that time. This not only saves your time while snoozing an email without editing the time all the time but also helps you be on the top of important messages every day. To do so, just hover to settings->snooze. Here you can set snooze times in the morning, afternoon and evening as well. You can also set your weekend time so that you can snooze emails to review in your free time.

Editing Signature

You can add/remove/edit your Signature which would get appended to every message you send in the Inbox. Of course, you cannot do certain things such as changing the font, adding an image etc to your signature as you could in Google Mail. To change your signature or to add one, head over to Settings->Signature.